This disclosure relates generally to a technique for integrating a user's social network account with the user's gaming network account to provide additional gaming network functionality.
With the advancement in processing power and functionality of mobile devices, video game applications, which were once reserved for stand-alone gaming systems, have become an extremely popular category of applications for these devices. Based on the popularity of gaming applications and the connected nature of the mobile devices on which they are often executed, a relatively recent development is a gaming network service that allows users to establish relationships with friends, initiate games with these friends, and track game statistics with respect to friends and other game users from within the gaming network. Developers of gaming applications that are compatible with the gaming network provide functionality in the gaming application that enables the application to interface with the gaming network to provide scores, statistics, and the ability to initiate the game from within the gaming network. One example of this type of gaming network is the Apple® Game Center service. (APPLE is a registered trademark of Apple Inc.)
A gaming network is a type of social network in that it allows users to establish relationships with friends and to compete against and compare game statistics with these friends. While a gaming network allows a user to establish relationships and control their gaming experience from a single location, some users may not utilize the full capability that a gaming network provides. For example, a user may not be aware of acquaintances that also have gaming network identities.
In order to facilitate the establishment of gaming network relationships, a gaming network service may provide automatic friend recommendations based on various factors. For example, the gaming network may recognize an overlap in the friends of two gaming network users and may provide friend recommendations to one of the users based on friends of the other. In addition, the gaming network service may obtain contacts from an email account of a user and search for gaming network users associated with any of the obtained email addresses. The gaming network might also allow a user to manually search for gaming network friends by email address, user identity, etc. While these methods may allow a user to establish relationships over time, it would be beneficial to provide another mechanism to facilitate the establishment of gaming network relationships.
A gaming network user having a gaming network identity may also be a social network user having a different social network identity. Example social networks may include Facebook®, Twitter®, and LinkedIn®. (FACEBOOK is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc, TWITTER is a registered trademark of Twitter, Inc. LINKEDIN is a registered trademark of LinkedIn Corporation.) Oftentimes, it will be the case that the user has a much more established set of relationships in the social network than in the gaming network. For example, a new user of a gaming network may have very few gaming network friends but may have hundreds or thousands of social network friends. Many of the user's social network friends may also have gaming network identities and may be in a similar situation of having relatively few gaming network friends. It would be beneficial to take advantage of a user's already established social network relationships and the functionality of the social network to maximize a user's gaming network experience.